The Educated Kiwi
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Free Documentaries
Sep 2nd
One of the good things about doing break time duty is that you get to talk to staff that you would normally not get to know. You also find out things that you didn’t know and some of them turn out to be useful. Top Documentary Films is a site which catalogues a bunch of free documentaries found on various video sites on the web. I scanned a few and some were English with foreign subtitles, others vice-versa and regular English no subs. Using the VideoDownloadHelper plugin for Firefox I can transfer these videos to our internal PHP Motion server so that students can watch them without cranking through the bandwidth. Another great resource.
Time for some inspiration.
Jul 28th
There are times when I start to feel a little stale cocooned in my world and I have forgotten to look outside. Thanks to my new iPad I found this as I browsed video podcasts on iTunes.
Facebook Apology
Jun 17th
I have to say after watching this video I did feel a bit like the complaining about privacy is a bit rich considering that people pay nothing for Facebook. We all like privacy but then you can’t blame the company for wanting to make more money can you?
Four Chord Song
Jun 10th
A little light relief. Australian comedy group ‘Axis Of Awesome’ perform a sketch from the 2009 Melbourne International Comedy Festival. Footage courtesy of Network Ten Australia.
See http://www.axisofawesome.net/ for more details of the comedy trio including Jordan Raskopoulos, Lee Naimo, & Benny Davis.
Bad Gramma, the video.
Jul 27th
Despite Evan distracting me with good humoured music, after a revisit of jamesatwar we watched Bad Grammar. At the end of the video it thanked HotForWords which made me curious So with a click I found the site of Marina Olvova. Not that it needs much explaination but as wikipedia states the theme of Orlova’s YouTube videos, which begin with the tagline “Intelligence is Sexy”, and of her website is tracing the origins of English words. This video from AP gives some insight or the site is here.
PHPMotion Redux
Jul 1st
Back in April 2008 I did a post on a YouTube clone called PHPMotion which was then in version 1. The software is now in version 3 and we have just installed it on our school server. The latest version is still a bit of a pain to install, it runs on PHP and MYSQL like wordpress, but is not as well supported or documented. The bottom line is you better be keen but you will save a heap on bandwidth and be able to give access to all those great videos available online. As well as YouTube videos you can also add clips from DVD’s. If you did this on YouTube they would quickly receive a take down notice from the copyright holder but with PHPMotion only accessible from the internal network people in the outside world are non the wiser – of course you must own the material to start with. As a Hard Materials and Graphics teacher I find some fantastic instructional videos on using tools and techniques which I can now share without using extra bandwidth.
Version 3 also has photo sharing which means you can keep photographs of students safely in the gated village if you so wish rather than using public photo sharing like Flickr.
If you want any help setting up a video sharing server let us know and we will see what we can do to help.
Unlock Moodle Potential
Jun 17th
One of the effects of the latest flu pandemic is that a school can be shut down at anytime. Our particular school policy states that we will provide materials online while students are away so that they may continue with their studies. Unfortunately in a practical based subject that is a little difficult and rather than reinvent the wheel I went trolling for links to existing material. I have to say that Workshop Technology is not well represented online in New Zealand, something I would like to rectify given the time. What I did find were these videos showing the potential of moodle in secondary education – check out these great videos by MoodleFairy.
Everlong
Jun 16th
I downloaded the guitar tab (sheet music for guitar) for “Everlong” by the Foo Fighters about 2 years ago now. It’s one of those songs that I love, especially the acoustic version, but every time I try and play it I put it back in the “too hard basket”. It also happens to be one of the songs on Guitar Hero World Tour which I score quite highly on guitar and that prompted me to have another go on the real guitar.
I have basically taught myself guitar recently from downloading tabs of songs I know and trying to replicate them but without having any proper tuition sometimes I am stumped. Then it occurred to me to go to YouTube for a guitar lesson and no kidding, I was playing Everlong within about half an hour. Even my wife said it sounded good.
I picked up a couple of key points from the video. Firstly I needed to tune my E string down to D and boy did that make life easier. Most importantly the teacher talks about holding shapes with your fingers on the frets. Trying to apply numbers and fingers and frets from a diagram is hard but when the guy says make this shape with your fingers, then move it here, then here it all becomes clearer.
I could go on to apply lots of profound educational speak about the way people learn but take whatever meaning you like from this. Instead I encourage everyone to learn a musical instrument using the internet and I hope you get as much satisfaction as I do.
Newsmaker.app Great Fun
Apr 1st
Since Learning@School we have been waiting for the release of Newsmaker for Mac and PC. Now we have our full site license we can move on from our enhanced garageband podcast to full video.
In using the app I have found it to be very simple with a small installed size (27mb) and a very quick learning curve. Overall I can see students being able to write and draft their work in this and then publish in a number of periods. The results of which will be both fun and a positive experience of using video and IT for our staff who can often be put off by the time required to produce anything with video.
At $500 NZD for a site license I felt it was a reasonable deal.Boinx TVwhich I had looked at is $199 USD for a single License and was possibly a bit to complicated for most staff (although I have brought the machiest bundle in the hope it will be unlocked for our official school newscast but hey thats just the tech snob in me as my year 12 and 13 class would say.
wiimote, so easy
Oct 15th
To further advertise the simplicity of using the wiimote pens this video shows my Two year old daugther using the wiimote irpens on the projector in the lounge. She now loves standing on the toy box and drwing on the wall. good one dad 
Flip4Mac Drive-in
Oct 15th
Software for copying your dvd’s to your Harddrive $39 US. I am not sure whether I have a big enough Hard Drive for all my dvd’s but it is interesting that here is a company that is allowing you to copy dvd’s legally.
NZ election debate questions
Oct 7th
Following on from all the US political excitement, here in NZ we can ask questions of our politicians through youtube it would seem. Now I just have to think up what to say about education. Hmm limited to 30 seconds.
BoinxTV
Oct 5th
BoinxTV – Seed 4 – Click here for more blooper videos
I got my prerelease copy of Boinx Tv which seems like a great tool. I look forward to using it at ulearn I just have to convince Kelvin to go on camera again after our last video attempt.
YouTube – Wiimote Whiteboard vs. Commercial Electronic Boards
Sep 23rd
YouTube – Wiimote Whiteboard vs. Commercial Electronic Boards.
I visited Tepuke High School today and was really impressed by the setup for their wiimote iwb’s I look forward to building my own this week. Will post some photos of the setup later, If only my n73 bluetooth would work with osx.
Video conversion with DownloadHelper
Sep 12th
Please be aware that with the updates of downloadhelper you now have the ability to convert as well as download. Follow the link below for further instructions.
DownloadHelper’s primary job is to retrieve to your disk the videos that are playing in Web pages, in their original format.
Unfortunately, the native format generally FLV is often not very convenient when it comes to playing back the videos, on either your home computer or a hand held device, burning them to a DVD or reworking the movie.
With the new DownloadHelper’s Video Conversion feature, you can very easily select one or more videos that lie on your disk and choose a pre-defined output format. The program will process the movies in background.
Even better: you can setup the extension to automatically convert the videos as soon as they are saved by DownloadHelper. You can even specify conversion rules which site, which original media format to be processed with a given set of parameters.
Video conversion is available on DownloadHelper 3.1 or later.
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